1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data storage and retrieval. More specifically, the present invention relates to retrieving electronic data records related to a given subject, when such records may be distributed among many locations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic data is pervasive; electronic data records have been created to capture details about almost every transaction or event that occurs. Often however, electronic data is highly dispersed. For example, electronic medical records regarding a specific individual may exist in many locations. For example, an outpatient clinic may maintain a set of electronic records for individual patients treated by the clinic; a hospital emergency room may have data related to the same patient; while at the same time, a pharmacy may maintain records for prescriptions issued by both the clinic and the emergency room. In most cases, these providers will not have access to the electronic records of one another. As even this simple example illustrates, electronic medical records related to a patient may be widely distributed across many entities.
In many cases, it would be useful to provide access to a comprehensive set of electronic medical records related to a given individual, including records that may be widely distributed across multiple entities. Doing so, however, has proven to be a difficult endeavor. One proposed method includes creating a national health information infrastructure from many regional networks, wherein each regional network shares access to (or stores) electronic health records among a number of participants. Once established, these regional networks (referred to herein as RHIOs, for Regional Health Information Organization) may be connected to form a nation-wide infrastructure. Thus, a national health information network may emerge from a specialized “network of networks,” making electronic medical records available to health care providers when and where they are needed.
One significant problem faced in creating such a national (or larger) infrastructure, however, is locating a comprehensive collection of electronic healthcare records for an individual patient that has records spanning multiple data nodes. For example, consider a common scenario of treating an unconscious patient at a hospital emergency room. In such a case, a treating physician may desire access to a complete set of medical records regarding the patient to determine a course of treatment, regardless of where the records are located. The physician may, or may not, know which RHIO is associated with the patient's primary care physician, but is unlikely to know a complete set of data nodes that have medical records related to the patient.
One approach to sharing electronic medical records among multiple RHIOs involves connecting the individual RHIOs using a nationwide master patient index and registry that identifies which RHIOs contain electronic records for an individual. In this case, the physician seeking records for the unconscious patient would access the master patient index to identify the various RHIOs that have electronic records regarding the patient. However, both technical and social barriers may make this an inadequate (or impossible) solution. First, the cost of the infrastructure required to implement such a solution may be prohibitive. Second, political and social concerns regarding patient privacy and the security of electronic medical records may prevent this approach from ever being practical, regardless of the technical obstacles and cost of implementing it. Moreover, the master patient index may create a single point of failure for the entire system; should the master patient index and registry become unavailable (e.g., for technical reasons), participants within an individual RHIO would be unable to locate electronic records using the master patient index.
Another approach to locating a comprehensive collection of medical records for an individual patient is to perform a brute force search of hundreds, or even thousands, of RHIOs in an attempt to locate records related to a given individual. However, this approach will often become very time consuming and inefficient, especially in situations where life-or-death decisions must be made quickly, or when used repeatedly for multiple searches related to the same individual.
Accordingly, the approach of creating a national health care records infrastructure from a “network of networks” presents the challenge of how to locate records related to a given individual when the records may be dispersed across many of the different networks. Using the RHIO as an example, in connecting hundreds, or thousands, of RHIOs, a requesting party must be able to efficiently determine which RHIOs contain electronic records for a given individual.